But the sense of wonder and curiosity Jennifer felt as a child, as she looked into the vast and magnificent night sky, has never left her. While science is a "wonderful tool for understanding the physical universe", Jennifer says her religious beliefs give her the answers to the bigger philosophical questions in life — like how mere humans can be significant at all in the context of the universe. To me that's a gift. So, by studying more of nature you're … enriching your understanding of God," she says.
Jennifer suggests the public's fascination with images of the universe stems from a human desire for meaning. The apparent conflict between science and religion is a relatively recent phenomenon, that's been "invigorated" by the media's need for drama, says Jennifer, who directs the program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Did God create the Universe?
While some point to statements in the Bible as evidence Christianity is incompatible with science, Jennifer says the book has to be seen in its historical context. After finishing his undergraduate science degree in the UK, Andrew went travelling in South-East Asia and that's when he first discovered Buddhism. After rejecting Christianity at an early age, Andrew says he went through some "very nihilistic" teenage years.
Today he runs two labs at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, where he studies the mechanism of sexual transmission of HIV and the immunology of Crohn's disease. His official email signature not only includes his scientific credentials, but his spiritual name as well — Dh Shantideva. And he teaches meditation and mindfulness in his workplace. Over 50 per cent of US scientists surveyed in said they believed in a deity or higher power.
Andrew is fascinated by cosmology — his favourite book is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking — but he sees Buddhism as answering different kinds of questions to science. Buddhism, Andrew says, is interested in "creating the conditions for enlightenment to arrive" — a state in which people feel "unconditional love, deep spiritual peace, completely free of inner conflict".
The trick, he says, is to understand and accept "the true nature of reality" and that attachment to things — like our youth, loved ones, jobs or money — is the source of suffering. I don't believe you can prove the existence of God. Andrew finds the Buddhist ideal of detachment as particularly useful in helping him to ride the ups and downs of scientific work.
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Not being too attached to your own theories, he says, means you can be more open and sceptical, and less likely to succumb to dogma. But, says Andrew, there are some clashes between Buddhism and the idea that we can be reduced to a bunch of particles, and that studying matter will ultimately explain the whole of our reality. Fahad first encountered religious resistance to scientific ideas in a junior high biology class in Bahrain, where Darwin's theory of evolution was deemed "fundamentally flawed".
Fahad was brought up a Muslim. As a teenager, he read the Koran, but began to question the religious practices he saw around him, including the treatment of women. At the same time, he was realising he was gay — something that put him at odds with most Muslims around him. But after his mother was diagnosed with cancer he was left feeling a void, and was drawn back to Islam.
He says some of the tension between science and religion arises because people take the Koran and Bible literally. A lot of people say "a lot of stupid things" in the name of religion but the opposite should be true, Fahad says. He says in his reading, the Koran encourages "compassion, common decency, generosity and intelligence". While there are "big moral questions" about how to apply genetic modification, he believes it should be used to cure disease and increase food production.
After all the concept of space, the universe etc. So now we should really refer to the Big Bang as the Genesis of the Universe It's all down to perception of 'What is God'. To say that the laws of physics created the universe is insufficient as then you can ask what created the laws of physics. Something did - and if you want to put a name to it - you call it God. I cannot see how this forum will get any closer. Unless God has been posting and may choose to unmask himself or herself The Pakistan cricket scandal, The resignation of William Hague's special adviser, further job cuts at the State owned bank.
These are real stories. God is just a good way to polarise opinion based on religion as a starting point. I would think that any group of scientist who believe that they have the ultimate answer to what are basically philosophical questions have forfeited the right to call themselves scientists.
Come on BBC you are just giving space to atheists and theists who think God is some kind of mechanical engineer.
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Nothing like indulgence in superstition disguised as either scientific or spiritual debate. I wonder whether the BBC has a motive in downgrading the substance of religious discourse. Preparing the population for some fundamentalist religion perhaps? It has to be said that religion encourages you to absolve yourself of your own responsibilities, and those of others. Society has reached a stage where now, more than ever, we need to be personally responsible and not put it all in the hands of some "higher power".
There are lots of Theologians and Scientists who are Christians, who agree that there is no need to invoke God in the gaps of our understanding but clearly they still manage to retain a belief in God. So, for example, it might be quite correct to say that 'The kettle has boiled because of the heating effect of the element', but wrong to then deduce that 'Therefore it did not boil because you wanted a cup of tea.
The biblical Christian view is that God has indeed revealed Himself already in creation, in the bible, and most crucially by His Spirit. This 'revelation' is Spiritual. However to then say you don't know because something from nothing goes against your basic understanding of science is a strange thing to say. The science behind the creation of the Universe is orders of magnitude beyond 'basic' and very few people understand it.
Much of physics doesn't make any sense to the layman simply because we don't understand the complex science behind it. It should also be pointed out that the basic knowledge of science many people have is usually wrong in a totally factual sense. A lot of science gets simplified when explained to a general audience.
It's known as 'lies told to children' because the full facts are too complicated for most people to grasp. Which God are we talking about here? The concept of a god is only relevant to science if it appears in any equations. However, do not let that stop you from enjoying life. We live in the age of science and whilst anyone has the right to believe whatever fanciful nonsense they wish, I expect - no, in fact I demand - that an august organisation such as the BBC be more enlightened than to run HYS threads pandering to the zealots. And another thing… Suppose that you really cannot believe that all this we see on Earth and in the universe could come about without the intervention of a creator of some kind let's call him God , why the heck would you choose to follow one of the established religions?
These were created thousands of years ago, and handed by word of mouth for centuries, then written down in a language of thousands of years ago, then translated many times through further languages.
All the "appearances" and "documented" actions of these religions happened thousands of years back and none in recent and more reliably documented years, isn't that peculiar? If you feel that everything we see is too much to happen by evolution and physics and that there must be a creator, then design your own one. It will have no less validity. If it helps solve the riddles of the universe for you, then that's dandy.
- Missing Soluch: A Novel.
- The Universe Could Not Have Been Created by God: The Failure of First Cause Arguments.
- The Delusions of Richard Dawkins;
- Has Stephen Hawking ended the God debate? - Telegraph.
Although, there is still that eternal question of how did your creator come into existence, but hey, we can just gloss over that one…. At least the scientific explanation has vast timescales and creeping progression to allow these things to happen, the religious one requires the most complex thing to create itself in an instant. Its a great place and frankly I am bored with the ever increasing politicisisation and social interference of science seems to be growing more unpleasant as time passes , I am actually gonna side with the belief in the creation of everything by a divine being.
I suppose with the idea of omnipotence, that any God is generally beyond human comprehension in its infinite wisdom and ability that I doubt a mind as brilliant as Hawkings is even able to comprehend such a thing nor its abilities and motivations. Okay, how about this. Science, selection, life, death, movement, space, time, light, dark, conscious, unconscious, history, humour, conversation, sadness, happiness, animals, bacteria, hair accessories, the elements, the planets Everything comes from God, everything, at some point, will return to God.
Indeed, we are part of God! God is also a collective of every single consciousness that has ever been, is now and will ever be, they are all a part of it, feed into it, feed from it! We have been afforded a great privilege in being able to, for a moment, step away from it, to experience independence, the ability to make choices for the benefit of fellow individual consciousnesses as well as ourselves.
Given the ravages of time etc, our bodies will deteriorate and when our bodies die, if we are lucky we will return to that collective, retaining all that we have experienced in this life and be able to share it with the great consciousness, the collective. That contribution aids the continuous development of everything in the universe.
You might think it a little far fetched or perhaps I smoked too much pot in college, but I like it. We're as bad as one another with the ability to be so much better. Stephen Hawkins is just another fallible man on a rock hurtling through the universe as we all are. His views are all that they are - views. The common argument religion takes is that you can't prove God doesn't exist, therefore we'll believe in him.
In that case, you can't prove fairies don't exist, or Aliens don't exist Do I believe God created the universe? No, not until he reveals himself or is discovered. Do I believe the science? I think its the most likely explaination so far. At last, someone that is well respected has come out with the truth, NO God, in fact no anything only infinity. If that scares you tough, you're surrounded by it and you can't do a thing about it.
Just a thought, the died in the wool religious when they think of heaven assume because they look up towards space that it's up there. Sorry to dissapoint you all but we all know now that it's space, it has no end, a bit scary really if you hope that when you pop it you go to heaven or the promised land, only infinity beckons. One rather suspects that at the end of the day Hawking has as much idea on the matter as anyone else. The idea that Universe is a Spontaneous creation from nothing on the face of it seems pretty absurd; the idea of a creator seems to make more sense.
Humans are too intelligent and not intelligent enough at the same time. We are so intelligent that we have discovered that we are simply one small planet in an enormous universe, and we are clever enough to ponder big questions like "why are we here" and "what created this universe". However, we are not intelligent enough to work out all the answers. We therefore created God and religion. I don't think anybody truly knows if God created the universe or not. I don't really believe in God but I can't disprove his existence.
Superstition is just an attempt to explain what we don't understand, and it makes no more sense to say that there is only 'one god', as opposed to a 'pantheon of gods'. Why not worship Zeus or Odin and their sub gods, as say Jehovah or Allah, when it makes no difference either way? If you believe in the supernatural, then why does it have to be in just one form? If you believe in science, and mans attempts to explain phenomomen via theory and experiment, then there is no need to worry about godheads Personally I find religion to be an objectionable mental illness so I'm quite pleased that Stephen finds no god in his models.
Any reasonable logical mind puts its belief in things that can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. Just by simply saying that something is true or exists does not make it so. I'll give you an example. I believe in unicorns.
You can't disprove me as unicorns work in mysterious ways. Con-men who like to take advantage of other human beings by creating fault deitys in which to obtain a degree of control over there fellow man also exist. Either unicorns exist because I say they do, along with god. We have equal evidence for both none AKA faith. If God did create the universe then he also created homosexuality, abortion clinics, discos, Miaow Miaow and religious people who in my experience are the most judgemental and least forgiving folk around.
However, a sentient, omnipotent benevolent being? I see no evidence whatsoever for that. Faith can be acceptable where there is a lack of evidence for any side of the debate, but to persist in extolling Blind faith when there is clear evidence to the contrary could be described as ignorant. What's the matter with that? The matter with that is matter. If the definition of God and Nature are one and the same thing, then yes, I think that Nature created the Universe.
I'm a scientist, and although I do not believe in God, I do have respect for Nature. Nature, or more accurately, evolution on this planet at least , is just a highly complex chemical reaction which started on a barren piece of rock billions of years ago. There's no intelligence behind it all, but it is undeniably very, very clever. I think we'll one day find that what we call the Universe, is in fact just one of many, we've simply not reached the next level of understanding yet. Just as galaxies like our own Milky Way are now understood to be plentiful and widely dispersed I think we'll come to understand Universes in much the same way.
Personally, I believe GOD is a scientist and not by himself. I feel there are others not as accomplished as the lead being. They may also have deliberately spoiled his experiment us. I believe that the different religious factions on the planet are the spoil.
I am a big follower of NASA and listen with interest to the worlds leading scientists. I have a theory that the original centre of the creation of the universe, is from a singularity with a DNA, stabilized by something and waiting for something to trigger it to develop. Like others who follow science with optimism E. As many have said - we can't know. It is a matter of what you believe. All science can tell you is how our universe works. It tells us nothing about where that universe comes from or what existed before the start.
Contrary to what many here believe there is a lot of uncertainty in the premises of cosmologist theorising. It only takes a couple of the foundations to be proved incorrect for the whole house of cards to collapse. There are as many scientific controversies over the origins of the universe as there are theological debates.
Many specialists, who know far more about the physics involved than most posting here, have theories completely in contradiction of the "Big Bang" hypothesis, for example. Even if we know everything there is to know about the physics of the universe that doesn't tell us where it actually came from, and we are far from that knowledge.
Much of the scientific explanation of physics is based on the premise of so far undetected particles and energies. Despite looking for decades with hugely expensive equipment these are taken as given even though no trace has been found. They are stated as existing because it must be so to fit the predictions of the theorists. That seems rather like faith to me. Those here who take Mr Hawkings statement as gospel forgive the pun are no different to those following many another prophet. If you delve into the subject of physics you find a lot of controversy and fudge that is used to make the theories and calculations of physics fit observed reality.
Personally, I'm a Christian. I believe in God but I can't prove the existence of God, but neither have I seen anything yet in science that proves God's non-existence. We each have our own faith, in either God or science. Live and let live. God is the subject of ones own faith, and faith is the substance of things "hoped for" which is evidence of things not seen. As for the question: The Bible The Old testament starts with Genesis and gives a pretty good description of what scientists think existed before the "big bang". The Bible describes this as a void. It then states that God said "Let there be light and the light shone forth".
The universe came out or was created out of nothing and the scientists are only speculating about how this was possible. The Large Hadron Collider LHC is still not fully operational and only then, after experimentation and observation can the researchers explain, or not explain, how this could happen. Until then who or what created the universe is a matter for speculation and will only result in a polarised discussion like this with "smart" athiests and "brainwashed" religious people arguing. From my very limited knowledge of quantum mechanics I would say that some of the "non-believers in sky gods or pixies" crowd would have great difficulty taking in some of the theories.
These theories if found to be true could pave the way to time travel and travelling enormous distances. Now would a better topic not have been "What a magical place the universe is what do think created it?
- LOpprobre (French Edition).
- The Delusions of Christopher Hitchens;
- Are religion and science always at odds? Here are three scientists that don't think so.
The only answer is that creator-gods cannot possibly exist. This is also true if God is placed "beyond logic". Doing this puts God into the territory of irrational fantasy. To retreat into the corner where logic itself is denied, god-believers have admitted that there is no logical basis for their belief. And if it is said that Human logic is incapable of realizing such metaphysical truths, then this also undermines any argument that can be made by one human to another, for the existence of god.
Everything must have a cause, therefore, god exists as the ' first mover '. But the argument means that god itself must have a cause, else, god cannot exist. So the true form of this argument is that " everything must have a cause, except one thing ". The problem with this is that it gives no indication of what the first-cause must be.
In all cases, the first-cause is not a pure or simple concept, but a collection of well-developed characteristics, drives and powers.
BBC - Have Your Say: Did God create the Universe?
An uncaused God is more complicated than an uncaused Big Bang. When it comes to comparing arguments where there is no hope of actually getting any physical evidence, there is a long-standing heuristic to help distinguish between theories, called Occam's Razor: God requires many properties and complexities such as consciousness, thought, personality, creative drive, love, an internal logic ordering its thoughts so that it can think coherently and rationally, memory, etc: All of these properties must have been derived from somewhere.
It turns out that God is a vastly more complicated thing than the Big Bang and the fundamental laws of the Universe. These theistic assumptions include attributes about God: Even if it was found that the First Cause must be a conscious god, then, it is not reasonable to automatically assert that all those other assumptions are true too. There have been a great many variant concepts of god in history 3 partially because it's not clear what properties and features God should have. In our experience, mind only exists in physical systems that are above a certain threshold of complexity.
So it could be argued that an infinite mind is infinitely complex and hence far less likely than a universe. According to our best scientific understanding of the primeval universe it does indeed seem as though the universe began in the simplest state of all - thermodynamic equilibrium - and that the currently-observed complex structures and elaborate activity only appeared subsequently. It might then be argued that the primeval universe is, in fact, the simplest thing that we can imagine.
Its list contains the following items - click on each for a discussion and some comments on the logical problems associated with them:. Some theists argue that God is eternal and was therefore never created. But I find this is an argument that can be used in conjunction with Big Bang theory to prove, again, that god is not likely to exist as a first cause. If it is possible for something to exist forever and not need a cause then it is likely to be the Universe, not God, and once again we can theorize that this is likely to be true because there would be no reason for god if it was true that something could exist with no cause 6.
In order to create , to think , God's thoughts must be more than random. To create the universe and its laws, God must be able to think logically. If it can't think logically, then, the laws of the universe were simply random, and the Universe might as well have been self-created in an atheistic manner.
In other words, for God to exist, God's thoughts must have always been ordered in a logical manner otherwise God could never have created order from chaos. Kepler, one of the great minds in the history of science, came to similar conclusions about geometry , but didn't go as far as to say that it preceded God:. It is co-eternal with the mind of God Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation Geometry is God Himself.
Kepler was assumedly counting mathematics and the general rules of the universe as 'geometry'. This means that logic is a precursor to God. Logic, with its simple relations and rules that lets thought itself be ordered, must have existed independently of God's creative power. God could not have created the logic because requires logical thoughts to do any meaningful creating. In theology-speak, the first cause is the description given to the creator of the universe, time, the laws of physics, etc.
But it seems that in order for the first cause to be a creator-god, then that god cannot have created logic, and cannot therefore be the first cause after all. In other words, the fact that God needs to think logically in order to create means that God itself cannot be the creator of everything, only of parts of reality. In other words, there cannot be any monotheistic creator god. If God chose to create anything then it must have had reasons to do so. God's "will" is not random, meaningless, chaotic or thoughtless.